


Rebuild

by Runespoor



Category: No. 6 (Anime & Manga), No. 6 - All Media Types, No. 6 - Asano Atsuko
Genre: Gen, M/M, POV Outsider, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 14:02:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Runespoor/pseuds/Runespoor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karan, on her son growing up, the city changing, and Nezumi returning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rebuild

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chibifukurou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chibifukurou/gifts).



> Thank you to percygranger and Miaou for betaing; incessant fiddling means all remaining mistakes are my own.

**I.**

“It looks like it might storm again,” Vitello says, picking up his poppyseed loaf as Karan finishes counting the change. Vitello, formerly of West Block, walks one mile to buy Karan's bread, which he insists is worth every minute of the way. 

It also gives him the perfect excuse to drop see how his grown-up daughter is doing. Vitello was thrown out of the city when the wall was built, and neither saw or heard of his family in years. He once told Karan the story, in the sudden way that sometimes grabs people, words gushing out to a baker, or a hairdresser, or the person they buy newspapers from.

It's a story Karan is familiar with, as people from outside the city and people from inside the city look for the ones that were taken from them. I

t seldom ends as happily as her own story, or Vitello's, and Karan never knows quite how to react to the sad ending. There's something hypocritical about soothing the hunched shoulders and watery eyes of someone who's lost a relative when you had a hand in planting the roots of what's responsible. Karan is never going to exorcise the ghost of No.6 and her part in it, a haunted house in reverse. 

Karan puts the coins in the right slots, closes the till, and only then looks up. “Ah, yes.” Her smile is fainter than usual, but he has already turned away, walking toward the door.

“Seems like there's twice as many storms nowadays,” the man says. “It's a miracle we can grow anything!” He shakes his head with something that might be disbelief.

Usually this might be the moment when Karan mentions her son, her Shion who's in every committee and an ecology specialist. Shion explained to her that it's true there are more storms now No.6's meteorological control project is so much dust - “but the storms aren't as violent,” Shion said. Only the stronger storms could rip through No.6's careful controlling, and they were strengthened by having been contained. On an objective scale, Karan knows her son is right. On a human scale, the infrastructure of new city isn't as solid as that of the previous No.6. Preventing casualties was the absolute priority of the first summer, but there's still a lot of waste in the crops.

But her tongue is heavy on the subject of storms, and after a last, startled glance back, as though he'd expected her to say something, Vitello reaches for the door, bell jingling, and Karan only wishes him a good day, casting her voice so he'll hear even after he's stepped in the street.

The door swings closed. 

Karan lets out a sigh, folding forward so her forehead rests against the cool surface of the till's banister, eyes closed. Storm season always drags in its attendant injuries, families in mourning after losing a child to the storm, every one a further weight onto Shion's shoulders. Last month, one death was avoided because Shion was there to throw himself into the river and pull the boy out of the suddenly-rising water. Because Shion was there. Walking alone by the river bank whose access he had argued should be off-limits during storms. Shion wrote procedures to survive the storms that have saved lives and that he doesn't follow. The storms get under his skin, each of them calling him louder than the last.

Shion takes everything that goes wrong in the reconstruction personally, every delay and mistake. Not like an attack against himself, it wouldn't be as personal if it were, but like a repudiation of his ideals or a breach to a promise he made. Her son always had the tendency to put others before himself. Karan won't blame him. She remembers well enough climbing windy scaffolds to take a look at the last construction she'd designed, because it was her responsibility, because it was her job.

And besides, storms remind Shion of Nezumi.

*

Shion doesn't keep track of the days; Karan knows in the way he sometimes glances at the calendar on which are scribbled the dates of past and future meetings with the committee, and he mouths silently as he counts down the days, eyes round with how fast time has flown. It takes more time than one person has to rebuild a city, and Shion's days are always spilling over into his nights, his papers spilling over the room, other people's given tasks into his, the rain spilling through the open window.

If anything, he counts storms. 

Karan has long ago stopped asking him to keep his window locked against the lashing rain. 

That would be blinding herself, but mostly it'd be cruel: denying him a piece of memory. During the years after they left Chronos and before the wall fell, Karan always used to lock the one window of their shared room tight during storms. She'd pull the shutters and test the window was good and closed, and dismissed thoughts of the last storm in Chronos from her mind. 

It wasn't that she feared (another) trespasser, but the construction in Lost Town wasn't as good as that of the elite neighbourhood. In winter or by humid weather, the wooden window would often refuse to close all the way; she'd have to coax it, gently, and then push.

Lost Town had its charms, the red-tiled roofs and flowers on windows, the paved street winding down the hill like something out of the children's stories her mother used to tell her and that she told Shion even after such tales had grown unfashionable; but it couldn't compare to the comforts of Chronos, the insulation, the plumbing, the sheer efficiency of its spatial arrangements. 

Karan had worked on Chronos back when it was still called Project Prometheus, blueprints for a model of the future buildings of No.6. She'd imagined it to be the perfect housing, the most convenient, the most energy-efficient, accessible to everyone. 

When the project was scrapped, along with half a dozen others their think-tank was working on, and she was shuffled over to administration, she hadn't thought she'd see any trace of it again. Her design for the Moon Drop hadn't made it past the first selections; other visions, other architects were coming into favor. When she'd been invited in Chronos as the primary caretaker of a genius child, she'd been surprised to find it so close to her original drawings; pleased; and a bit nostalgic. It had already felt like something of her past, for all its resolutely modern, positive technology.

It's different now. Shion leaves the window open, Karan doesn't have it in her to close it back, and the floor in front of the window is grown dark with the marks of repeated raindrops. A gust of wind blows Shion's papers all over the floor, where they're washed over by the rain, reduced to a wet, illegible pulp. The room always felt cramped compared to the sheer size of a Chronos accommodation, but now it just can't fit the two of them, with their bunk beds, Shion's contemplations, and all the paperwork necessary to rebuild a city.

Karan finally gets around to cleaning out the attic. She's always planned to make it into Shion's room when she'd have time, but somehow the years slipped by and she never found the time, instead using it to pile crates of stuff neither of them needs anymore, but which she was loath to part with. The insulation is even worse than in the rest of the house, and that's saying something, and the room is big enough that cold will definitely be a problem once winter comes, but at least Shion can have his own space.

“With all your work, you need real space,” Karan tells her son when she presents him with the idea. The mass of papers in the one bedroom has grown enough that despite Shion's relentlessly orderly approach to paperwork, it still encompasses the seat of the chair Shion doesn't use.

He blinks up at her, owlish under the feathery white of his hair. Upside down, Karan can make out random words from the title of the report, an alert to the committee about the stress the storms put on the sewage system. No wonder Shion focuses so much on his job: if the sewers give out, then all the problems they've had since the wall fell will seem like a birthday party.

“Huh?”

“Your work,” Karan repeats. “Honestly, Shion, you need more room than I've been giving you. I'll clean the attic for you, how does that sound?”

She doesn't speak of the books that have taken over most of the remaining space; clinging near to the walls like they don't want to be noticed, piling up in discreet towers by the bedposts. 

Spilling over in Shion's bed, one book by his pillow, like someone else’s head. Shion sleeps in books like a mouse in its paper nest. 

She doesn't try to put them away; they're organized by alphabetical order of authors, and she doesn't want to throw a wrench in Shion's attempt to put his life in order. If he is as fastidious with it as he is with the future of the city, she's got nothing to worry about.

Conflicting emotions play upon Shion's features, something like surprise and something, maybe, like sorrow. 

He's not so easy to read as he was a year ago, her growing son, and Karan is unsure how much is because he's growing and how much is because she hasn't yet gotten used to the new color of his eyes. Sometimes, when her sleeping pills fail her and blinks fuzzily awake deep at night and sees him bent over seemingly endless reports, his image superimposes with that of a sad moon clown from her own childhood, white and pale in the moonlight, the pink scar no realer than flour or stage make-up to her sleepy eyes. It's been years since she last thought of such fanciful things, but nowadays her son is accompanied everywhere he goes by a small mouse that chirps happily on his shoulder and has yet to make a move to ruin her pastries or run wild in her pantry. 

“That sounds—great, but. Isn't that a lot of work?”

 _You are seventeen and changing this city for the better_ , Karan doesn't say. Shion faces enough pressure outside without his mother pinning decades-old hopes on him. 

“I'll ask you for a hand when there's something I can't do on my own, of course. I think the movers put a couple old cupboards in there from the people that lived here before. We'll just have to push them against the walls so you have somewhere to put your clothes. And we can put up shelves, for your files and the rest of your things.”

“Oh,” Shion says, looking confused but happy. “Okay.”

It's a look she sees far too little on his face recently. For all his growing, and the long months he spent under another roof than hers, in some things he's still a child.

She gives into the urge to ruffle his hair. The texture has changed, but his startled chortle is the same. 

*

Karan remembers the first time she moved, how obsessive she was over every little detail. She was still a child then, and the house she and her parents were moving into then had been a smaller one; Karan would have to leave some stuff behind. She'd spent hours dilly-dallying over excruciating seven-year-old choices. When she's somewhere, she makes it become hers, so that when she leaves she feels she's leaving behind a limb, or a lung, something equally personal and equally necessary.

Shion's not like that. In Chronos, Shion had accepted every of her choices and suggestions for his room, and curled up in it with delight. Their house in Lost Town is much the same; it's hers, clearly, and Shion is happy there maybe because it is hers. He doesn't get attached to places the way she does; she's always known he'd never be an architect. He likes the things in their house that are most hers: blankets they wrap themselves in when in the winter the heater growls at being pushed further; the rounded glass jars she chooses lovingly for the kitchen and fills with sweets and spices; the old mirror that's survived sixty years that she got from her grandparents, its glass spotted with old age. 

Shion's attachments are to people, not places.

Since they were thrown out of Chronos, Shion seems to be gone on an exile of the heart that has no end in sight. Maybe that will change, finally, when Shion's promised land has returned.

Her wandering-eyed son when dark-haired, pale-skinned youths with their chins raised high pass them on the street.

After a while Karan has a decent impression of what Nezumi looks like.

 

*

Shion's other friends visit sometimes. Inukashi reminds her of Safu and Rikiga reminds her of the past and both are decidedly protective of her son.

They don't speak of Nezumi, but their silence around the subject speaks volume.

“Aren't you angry at him?” Inukashi asks Shion once – just once.

Shion tilts his head back, looking at the cold sky. The wall came down half a year ago already, and no-one mentioned Nezumi to Shion in all these months.

He doesn't answer for so long Karan can see the moment Inukashi decides Shion didn't hear, hesitates, and decides not to ask again, shoulders slumped in defeat.

When Shion speaks again, Inukashi starts.

“Were you angry I didn't answer?” Shion asks, without looking at his friend.

“Wha—no. I get why you'd need time to answer that.”

Shion stretches, arms rising high above his head. “Yeah. You'd need time.” Only then does he turn, and smiles gently at Inukashi. “So you see why I'm not angry at him.” 

Inukashi's mouth forms a small 'o' that Karan can see from where she stands, and he makes a small understanding grunt.

No-one asks Karan if _she's_ angry. 

Which is just as well: she'd have to make up her mind, and she's not sure she's willing to do that just yet. It feels too soon; not over. That may be a clue that Shion's persuaded her without trying to his way of thinking. She doesn't doubt either Nezumi will be back.

*

They've lived in this small house for a little over four years. Karan used to be an architect. She should really know better than to be surprised by how much _stuff_ is accumulated, stashed, hidden away, in the attic.

“And yet I still keep letting it surprise me,” she sighs, putting her hands on the small of her back to stretch. 

Her hair is tied in a kerchief exactly as it would if she was downstairs in the bakery, but here it's wrapped to protect from the dust and various spiderwebs (there are more spiders in Lost Town than there was in the elite quarters, and there are more spiders now than there was before No.6 fell. Yet another example of ecological manipulation from No.6 that Shion noted and disapproves of), while downstairs she'd be wearing it to prevent loose hair from falling in her eyes or in the doughs.

There are suitcases of clothes too small or somehow damaged she’d forgotten existed (she'll give them to the reconstruction committee: even if they can't be worn anymore, they can still be pulled apart for insulation material), the previous inhabitants' cupboards like she remembered, but also their old washing machine that she's convinced doesn't work anymore (and would likely require more electricity than their quota allots in these reconstruction times even if it did work), all of Shion's schoolwork (No.6 had stripped Shion of his awards and they'd had to give back all the technological equipment, but that still left several crates worth of essay and schoolbooks), toys he'd outgrown, and mementos of a time that was long past even before they'd left Chronos, from her colleagues at the No.6 think-tank or her parents. Some of these she keeps, moves them in the room – her room; most of them she arranges with the committee to get rid of.

Amidst the chaos she finds a waterproofed crate, old even by Chronos standards, that's filled with her things from when she was an architect. She pulls them out, disbelieving. Did she really pack them? 

The crate must date from the second-to-last, or even the third-to-last time she moved. At any rate, before she moved in Chronos with Shion. She takes a ruler and a pen from the crate, and sketches a line on a random piece of paper that used to envelop a broken vase she already removed. The line's straight, as far as she can test. Her things are good as they were the day she packed them – nineteen, twenty years ago. Back when No.6 was still a spark in her eye, and Shion wasn't one yet.

They join the rest of the things she's keeping in her room. 

*

Rikiga is a semi-frequent guest at their table. He's a recognized West Block representative, and a journalist, and he can denounce No.6's faults as someone it once betrayed; he always brings Shion's job with him, and while Karan recognizes that it might be more relaxing for Shion to be allowed his meals without being reminded of his responsibilities toward the city, hers has never been a family that banned shop talk at the table. Some families have that rule, don't they? 

But she's never been able to keep her work out of her everyday conversation, whether the bakery or when she drew buildings. And Shion's much the same: when her job was to raise him, she encouraged him to talk about what he was doing in school. Sharing ideas, like sharing food, was the fabric of society, she remembered hearing during her student days.

Probably from Rikiga.

He still nurses a little crush on her; Karan suspects it's because the air is filled with idealism and change once more, and Rikiga sees it as a do-over and sees her as part of that second youth, but he never hints at it and she's happy to let him keep on coming over so long as he doesn't. He helped Shion in West Block, after all, and she doesn't have many old friends left. Or any.

It's funny, how she never realized before, the way No.6 was scattering them, pulling them out of each other's life. It's funny how she never realized how unsocialized the perfect society she'd helped dream up had become.

Today Rikiga is here for the sewers. There's some flooding by the ex-West Block market, and while Rikiga's given to hyperbole like most literary types she's known, and the stalls probably don't have their feet in graphic descriptions she doesn't care to elaborate on, it's unacceptably unsanitary all the same.

They brainstorm together, though mostly Rikiga bemoans ex-West Block's lot and pleads for a solution, but he's more aware of the issue than both Shion and Karan, and he can tell them why their suggestions won't work. Evening dovetails into night, as it often does when the city's affairs invite themselves at their table, and Karan chews on the ginger and hazelnut cake they have for dessert with no more thought for her initial annoyance at Rikiga's dramatic hijacking of the subject matter.

In the end, they agree that rerouting the sewers so they go through the old purifying factory until they receive the electricity No.3 promised them for ten days from now to restart the new purifying factory is doable – and cheap, which never ceases to be an issue.

Rikiga leaves sated and satisfied, crowing about the shared merits of mother and son, and Shion and Karan are left alone, with the maps and specifications and resource lists still spread out on the table in layers, empty dessert plates pushed to the opposite corner of the table.

The clock is ticking the seconds as they start sorting out the papers, finally aware of time passing again. A paper clip has slipped from the bunch of papers it was holding together, and as Shion riffles through the layers, Karan finds herself gazing at a map of the city.

It's not an old map, neither is it an accurate one; it's the plan for the city the committee is trying to rebuild. Her finger follows the streets whose names are being changed, old paths made anew, from the empty place where a branch of the administration of the old No.6 used to stand, to the empty place where Shion wants to build something better, from the old security center that the map says will be a MUSEUM in the future, to the satellite building of the Moon Drop that used to house the Retirement Facility for the Elderly and which is now marked as a THEATER, small, bold caps in Shion's hand.

Karan's finger stills with a whisper of paper. The retirement facility held out better through the fall of No.6 than most others, standing as it does surrounded by nothing but flowers, nothing to crumble and damage its foundations. On the map, it's in the dead center of old No.6, but as this new map also includes West Block, the old center is much further on the east than it used to be.

“A theater wouldn't work here,” Karan says, tapping the paper.

Shion looks up from his stack to focus on what she's pointing. “Why?”

“Theaters need to be built with special attention to sound,” she explains, “so that sound carries all the way to the back and the sides. If you want a small theater, any room large enough will do in a pinch, but turning the retirement facility into a full-scale theater would be a lot of work. You'd have to tear down the entire inner structure.”

“I didn't know that,” Shion remarks. “No-one at the committee knew either, when I talked about it.”

There's a tiny frown furrowing his brow, casting his entire face into an expression of preoccupation. It's one she's had time to grow used to in the past months, but that she doesn't remember from before the wall fell. It might just be that the shadow of the frown stands in starker contrast under his white hair than it did amidst the mess of dark locks he used to have. Or it might be because there's more depending on Shion than at that time, and he's a grown man to the people he's working with, when he was a child for the system that controlled him. Or it might be unconscious imitation of the person he shared these months in West Block with.

“It's a nice idea. Was it yours?”

His mouth opens as if to speak, but nothing comes out, except a breath that turns into a sigh. He nods, bangs low on his eyes.

Karan turns the map so she can see it in its entirety.

“How big are we talking?” Her eyes are searching for possibilities. The university has conference rooms, but they can't house more than a few hundred people.

Is there no other place from No.6 that would fit their requirements? Karan isn't much surprised to realize. Theaters are place where people address other people, make them cry or laugh, make them think. No.6 wasn't big on encouraging people to think about upsetting things.

“Big, I want everyone to be able to go to the theater. I was thinking, there should probably be several, and people will probably want to open their own, but we should definitely encourage it. We should have a big public theater, to show it's important to us. And we'd let people who'd want act in it and put up plays.” He's babbling. Ideas pop out of him like soap bubbles, shimmery and fragile, dreamlike.

Karan takes one last look at the map.

“What with the restructuration... it'd be simpler and cheaper to just build one outright rather than turn something from the old city.”

“That'd still cost a lot,” he says ruefully.

“Yes. More than housings, more than a school.”

Shion bites his lip. “It can't be our priority. But I think it should be.” He looks at her. “Mom? As an architect, do you know, what's the minimum it would cost?”

*

She's not terribly surprised when Shion asks her for theater plans.

It's not anything she's ever drawn for the No.6 she helped build, the one she won't refer to as 'hers'.

This one if for the future.

She wonders if Shion is doing this for Nezumi. 

*

She doesn't ask why theater is important. Since the wall fell, Shion has been loud and insistent to explain why it was wrong for No.6 to have banned books, and theater, and music, and stories of all kind. 

There's been old, silent movies shown on the wide, white wall of the old City Postal and Information Service every night since the reels arrived from No.5, and the No.6 Official Orchestra that used to play at cocktails has expanded its style. Shion's talked about creativity and imagination and dreams.

“Dreams are important because they keep us honest about reality,” he'd said. Maybe that had been the problem with the old city. An unwillingness to compare with other utopias, or to consider the costs.

“They're called _humanities_ for a reason, you know.” The same reason No.6 forbade them: Karan doesn't need telling.

She doesn't ask, either, why theater is important to _him_. She's not blind, and Shion comes back to the subject with a passion that goes beyond his happiness that old movies are being shown and old political songs are on the radio.

Undoing the erasure of humanity takes longer than solving most concrete problems. Years after they've found a way to keep the orchards safe from the floods, pieces of the old No.6 keep getting unearthed, its bones peeking out from an abandoned gravesite.

Until now, expeditions into remnants of No.6 haven't been the priority; the few official buildings above ground that weren't destroyed with the wall have been stripped for goods at once, and everything that pertained to the Correctional Facility and the hospital as well, out of wanting to know the last of No.6's crimes. But there are still a thousand unexplored caches; the Moon Drop looked like a hive, and the tunnels of No.6 imitate an ant-hill. 

Now the city's durability is assured again, it's starting to be the time for that. Karan is slightly ambivalent, and disgusted at her for it. The more they dig out about No.6, the more troubled is Karan's sleep, although that may also have to do with the fact that she's cutting back on sleeping pills. She'd relied on them a lot to get through the nights when Shion was in West Block, but this is long behind them now, and besides, Shion having his own room, she can't hide behind the excuse that she's afraid to disturb his sleep. 

They find, in underground rooms deep beneath the old system's Official Customs, troves of confiscated goods that never made it past the doors of the city, brought over by visitors or people coming back from abroad, caves of books locked in perfectly water-proofed, forgotten rooms. Shion describes the findings with the gleaming eyes of one who's extracted a dragon's treasure, fiction and non-fiction and audiobooks and art posters, and he commandeers a ragtag band of volunteers to help him make an inventory of everything that's down there.

He doesn't surface for three days, during which Karan inventories her own recipes for lack of something better to do, and keeps coming across copies of the same cherry cake. 

At the end of the three days, Shion stumbles home, blueish bags under feverish eyes, beaming. She insists that he take a day off to catch up on sleep, but the next morning Shion's ran back to the committee, and by the end of the week No.6's first public library is open to the public. 

There's no official opening cocktail. Inukashi's suggested that if Shion wanted people to come, there ought to be a soup kitchen. Shion nods and enthuses it's a great idea, while Inukashi pulls a face, as though he can't quite believe Shion is for real, and Karan finds herself in charge of the soup. It works, as far as she can see. People flood in, attention caught by the town criers and the handful of colorful posters Shion's begged off artist acquaintances of Rikiga's, lured by the promise of free soup and the latest event in a series of the city-wide reconstruction project.

“I understand the books,” a man says, accepting the cup of zucchini-and-cumin soup Karan hands him. “But what's with this, though?” He nods at the reproduction of Guernica behind Karan's buffet. “It's all... grey and menacing.” 

“It's a painting from before the wars,” Karan answers, as she has countless times since the library's doors opened. “It's about war, and how authority can crush people, and freedom. It was banned for a long time.” 

The man takes a sip from his soup without even blowing on it, and doesn't burn himself. Karan dutifully turns up the heat of the hotplate under her cooking pot. “Is the soup hot enough? I can give you another cup if it's not.”

“No, it's fine.” He's still gazing at the painting, fascinated. “It's not a very happy picture, is it? Is it alright to put it here?”

Karan fumbles for explanations. Teaching isn't her forte, and Guernica... she hasn't seen it since she was a child playing with old postcards from before the wars her grandmother had saved. When she tried to look it up as an adult, out of idleness one day Shion was at school, she found the No.6 server crashed for the evening, and afterwards she forgot about it. “I'm happy we _can_ put it there,” she says finally. “We couldn't have, before.”

The man laughs. “No kidding! It's very... it's very strong.”

“There's an art section, if that interests you,” she says.

His eyes widen. “Books about that, too?”

She nods. “It's the third section on the left,” she points, though the numerous plans hanging on walls would tell the man as much. “Look for books about Picasso, he's the artist who painted it.”

“Picasso,” the man repeats. “Got it. Thank you!”

She's barely had the time to walk through the alleys herself this morning before the doors opened. The last crates of books were being driven in, Shion flitting from volunteer to volunteer to make sure everything was in order, fly-away hair all over the place, jittery with nerves and coffee.

She informs the volunteers who are helping with the soup stand that she's going on her break, and takes off her apron.

The alleys are bustling with people leafing through books that she has to dodge. She strolls aimlessly, her interest gradually shifting from the books to the people visiting. For some of them, it's their first time touching them, young citizens of the old No.6, easy to make out in the crowd by their dubious looks, while their companions are happy to explain, drag them from one bookshelf to another, trail fingers along book spines, seize one here and there with an exclamation, stories narrated to encourage the newcomer to take a chance, snatches of conversation weaving together.

There have been some mutters, when the wall fell, residents of No.6 unhappy with this turn of events, who feared the outsiders as hordes of barbarians, who'd usher in chaos and poverty. They thought civilisation would be razed like it had been during the wars, lost once again to destruction. In the library, though, it's the people from outside the walls that hold the key to a past older than the tabula rasa of No.6, that explain and teach. They're the ones bringing civilisation back to those who've had it erased from their memory.

She avoids the counters where long lines of people are already queuing to be able to borrow their single chosen book (“we're sorry, we want everyone to be able to take one home...”) for a limited duration of time, and retrieve their brand-new library card. Between silhouettes of waiting citizens, she glimpses at Shion's paper-white head, bent on his desk as he takes down the references of the book and the name of the person who borrowed it,

In the theater section, two preteens are amusing themselves by reading aloud a dialogue, mimicking actions without taking their eyes away from the lines. A small crowd has formed a semi-circle around them, amused, and several people slow down and flip through books in this section.

“It looks like fun,” a woman whispers to her friend, who gives a vigorous nod. “What if--”

“Shhh, I wanna hear!” the friend whispers back.

Out of the corner of her eye, a tall young man shuts a book closed with a snap, and puts it back on the shelf. His movement stutters when he looks in her direction - the alley is well and blocked with onlookers now - but he skillfully elbows his way through.

Karan listens some more, then shuffles out of the crowd when the preteens start bickering over whether a particular word in the last sentence should be emphasized or not. A glance at the time informs her she's been on break for over thirty minutes ago; she hurries back, feeling like her mind is swarming with the same mass of people crowding the alleys of the library.

 

**II.**

When Nezumi comes back, four storm-seasons have passed since Shion was given back to her. She doesn't know to expect him, though she has been waiting, because Shion has been waiting, but one morning there are two pairs of steps walking down the stairs. 

Shion enters the room, and when Karan turns to greet him the shadow trailing him has resolved into a young man with a sharp face and an uneasy set around his eyes.

“Mom, this is Nezumi,” he says, gesturing. “Nezumi, my Mom.” He's glowing in a way he hasn't for years, and his eyes are crinkled up with a smile. Yesterday was the library opening, a step away from the city's past errors; today, Shion's face looks like the future he's been building starts now. “You guys already know each other from back then, right? Or as good as.”

Nezumi's eyes fly over Karan's face. “Glad to meet you,” he says without taking his hands from his jean's pockets.

Despite Nezumi's reaction – both pointed and less-than-enthusiastic - to Shion's guileless assurance, Karan feels as though she agrees with her son. His looks are familiar to her from the people somehow like him that caught Shion's eye over the years, and more familiar still. 

Nezumi is the heart of all of Shion's silences, and his distant staring by the window. Nezumi is the odd, stilted speech, chopped-up like words are a secret Shion hasn't learned yet. Nezumi is the sometimes tirades echoing at odd hours from Shion's room, words spoken in a portentous, dramatic tone that fits her son so little; that, after she'd interrupted enough, Shion confessed was him reading aloud parts of plays.

Nezumi saved her son's life, which tells her he cannot be a bad person, and let her know of it, which tells her he isn't cruel, and that is all Karan needs to know about him to go through a first meeting. And a second. And a third. And – if he is unwilling to ever let slip more than that – she thinks it might be enough at all. She'd certainly _like_ to know him better, but she doesn't _need_ to.

Nezumi's shoulders are so strained under the studied slouch that if she attempted to hug him his bones might poke through her arms, or he'd break something. Karan refrains, and smiles instead.

“Hello, Nezumi. A pleasure to finally see the one who looked out for my son in the West Block.”

He is tall, and when he unfolds from his semi-slouch to return her greeting – with a glance Shion's way – spindly like a wet cat. Despite his name. His hair is dry, and yesterday wasn't a storm, but somehow is feels like it should have been.

“Do you prefer tea or coffee? We've got brioches this morning, or cereals, if you'd prefer,” she says, setting the pot of strawberry jam on the table.

“Coffee is fine.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Shion reaching to put a hand on Nezumi's arm, or shoulder, and Nezumi take a definitive step to the side. Shion's hand falls, and he brushes past Nezumi to join her in the kitchen proper. Nezumi bumps into a shelf, trying to avoid the contact, but doesn't quite manage. 

Shion keeps up a happy stream of domestic babble as he helps her take care of breakfast, and Karan is happy to join in, directing Nezumi to sit or asking him to please hand her the oven mitt behind him.

“Sit, sit, Nezumi,” Shion says, “three people moving in the kitchen, it's too crowded. Just wait a sec, it's almost done.”

“You'd make the guest work for his own food?” Nezumi replies. It sounds more like biting back than like banter, measured in scorn.

Shion only laughs lightly.

“Oh, is that what you are?”

Karan keeps her back to them, though she's already put the brioches in a serving basket and the cake pans in the sink.

“There! It's done,” she calls out cheerfully. “Shion, please pour me a cup of coffee.” Usually she'd request tea, but Nezumi doesn't need to know that.

A creak as Shion pulls a chair and sits. “Oh!-- Sure thing, mom! Nezumi, your cup?”

Karan smiles to herself, and doesn't try to hide it when she arrives at the table.

“I need some room for the brioches, please,” she says, with the plate in her hands. Shion, still holding the coffeepot, makes awkward attempts at pushing his plate. Nezumi just grabs the glasses and holds them away, clearing a space in the center of the table, while Karan sets the plate down.

“Thank you,” Karan says, as she sits. “Oh—I forgot the spoons—Shion, honey, can you get some spoons? For the jam, and-- do you take sugar with your coffee?” she asks Nezumi.

“No.”

“Just one for me, then,” she calls to Shion's retreating back.

She and Nezumi are left alone for all of forty seconds, maybe fifty. Today they're eating breakfast downstairs, in the bakery; usually when the weather is nice and warm like today, they'd eat on the second-floor terrace, but today Shion came down late, and breakfast needs to be done before she opens the shop. There's not even a door between the bakery's main room and the kitchen, just a flowery curtain to hide her backroom, which she left open as she was preparing breakfast and which Shion didn't pull back closed. All the noises permeate between the two rooms; from the table, they can hear drawers rattle, cutlery being moved. Shion humming a couple off-key notes she doesn't recognize before interrupting himself. Nezumi, facing the kitchen, can see his back.

It's impossible to have a private discussion without the person in the other room hearing everything.

That doesn't stop Nezumi from glancing at the stairs, before his gaze plunges back to the depth of his coffee mug again. He is back to the door, and Karan is at once sure that if he wasn't, he'd be glancing at that way out, too.

The rest of breakfast goes much this way, with Nezumi speaking only when spoken too, and then only in barely concealed hostility. If Nezumi means it against Shion and it's not returning to the city that's playing fast and loose with his mood the way Karan assumes, it's a wasted effort. For the entire duration of breakfast, Shion is beaming, his face like the sun after a storm.

But Nezumi's here, and he's eating breakfast. That's something; and, for this first morning, that's all Karan needs to know.

*

“You can take the cot for Nezumi,” she tells Shion afterwards. It's as much a question as it isn't; Karan didn't get the impression that Shion intended to let Nezumi leave any time soon, and she's planning on making this go as smoothly as she can.

He blinks in surprise. “Thanks, mom. We used to, we were used to sharing in West Block, but I'll let him choose.” There's no telltale blush on his cheeks.

Shion's twin bed isn't comfortable enough for two, but Karan decides not to mention it.

“There are clean sheets in the cupboard on the landing of the second floor, if you need them,” she says instead, and returns to arranging hot cakes on the shop's shelves.

It's only a minute later, after Shion's gone up the stairs, that she realizes the double-meaning in her words. It's embarrassing in a way that explaining puberty, sex, and contraception to a pubescent Shion wasn't.

She may have implied something that may not be there at all. She doesn't know what's between them; it's enough to know that they care. Shion loves Nezumi, but Karan's never prodded to know if he was _in_ love, though she has an inkling. Nezumi cares about Shion because he came back – not to the city, but to this exact address.

For a moment, she feels a pang of nostalgia for Safu. If the person in Shion's room had been Safu, there'd have been very little – no, there would have been no doubt at all. Safu always liked to make it clear where she stood. 

She can't go to Shion and tell him she didn't mean anything by it, either. _That_ would embarrass him for certain, even if he hadn't picked up on her accidental innuendo.

Well, Karan consoles herself. At least if Shion mistook her comment for what it wasn't, he couldn't mistake it for something negative. 

*

Nezumi's arrival throws their family's schedule off, in a manner that doesn't reduce Shion's workload, but does mean he does as much as he can from home. It used to be that she kept his plate in the oven and found it untouched in the morning, when he said he'd eaten something at the office. Nowadays he's always back before the bakery closes.

Nezumi's coming around to Karan's presence, which Karan attributes partly to wildness – a wild animal accepting he won't be hurt – and partly to pride - this is her house too, and avoiding her is a synonym for running away from her. Nezumi obviously is no stranger to running away, if his four-year absence from Shion's life is any evidence, but he's returned, so that means things have changed. He's not searching out her presence, but neither does he leave the room when she enters any more.

Tonight they're talking about the theater, because as Shion revealed two days ago at dinner, Nezumi is an actor. And Nezumi, though he made a great show of pressing his folded fingers to his forehead, and protesting Shion's enthusiasm, didn't refuse the subject when she started telling him about how the construction was going.

“I went this afternoon to check on things, and it's going well. Better than I was hoping: we aren't even running late yet!”

In Karan's experience, construction always takes longer than the original predictions, and with the city's means severely reduced... the atmosphere has changed since the wall fell, people are satisfied with what they are doing in a way they weren't before, when all they had was the facsimile of happiness that was No.6's grant to its citizens, but would that be enough to overcome the stumbling blocks of budget and time? She's approached the project with a mix of hope and pessimism that’s left her unsure.

“Shion told me you're the one who drew the plans.”

Nezumi is perched on a chair by the table where Karan put the ingredients for a gratin. While she was busy taking out an oven-proof dish, he has obtained a potato peeler and is diligently applying it to said vegetables.

“Yes, he asked me to. I'd forgotten I'd missed that sort of work.” 

“When Shion and I learned you'd been one of the ones who'd originally built the city, I didn't think it would be so literal.”

Karan laughs. “Oh, I didn't do the _building_. Only the planning.”

Nezumi's head tilts as he considers her answer, and she thinks he must be aware of what she's not saying, the efforts of the construction workers and the responsibility she's not dodging. After a moment, he nods graciously. “Fair enough.”

Feeling a little like she's won something, she goes on. “It's in the southwest, where the wall used to be. There used to be an unused hothouse there inside the city, which was supposed to house butterflies. They never got around to it, and when the wall fell it was destroyed.” A vast space of suitably-treated ground.

“It's a good place,” Nezumi says. “Where the wall used to stand... Did Shion choose it?”

Of course, Nezumi knows her son.

“Yes.”

“That sounds like something he'd do,” he comments.

He doesn't expand on his meaning. Karan opens her mouth to suggest he ask Shion to show him the place when the entrance bell jingles.

“I'm home!” Shion's voice calls out as Karan makes to return to her counter.

“Welcome home,” she calls back, Nezumi's voice joining hers. Shion's steps echo up the stairs, going to put his satchel away in his room before coming back down.

It's four days in a row Shion's been back before the bakery closes.

“Thank you,” Karan tells Nezumi.

“I don't mind,” he says, dropping a potato in the bowl of water she's prepared.

“For bringing him home,” she clarifies.

The potato peeler stops midway through disrobing the potato of its curly peel, and in that pause Karan recalls where she saw him before. On the day of the library opening there was a tall, dark-haired young man who'd stopped when he saw her in the crowd. She hadn't recognized him before, too many people for her to remember one face.

“You were at the library.”

The glance he shots her is one she's sometimes seen him shoot Shion, as the peeler starts sliding again.

“You're not very observant.”

This is not even close to the worst thing he could have said, and true.

“Did it take you this long to notice?” she asks, jokingly.

 _Splash_. Another potato plunges into the bowl.

“Touché,” Nezumi concedes. A pause. “Do you want me to slice the potatoes while you build the sauce?”

“That would be helpful, thank you. Fine slices, please.” 

Nezumi wields the cutting knife as effortlessly as the potato peeler. She understands he offered on purpose; he decided to show her, and let her draw her own conclusions. 

*

Inukashi doesn't like her much. When Karan asks how the baby is doing, he regards her with a wary stare, as though afraid she's going to try and take the baby from him. 

However, he likes Nezumi even less, as becomes apparent during his first visit after Nezumi's return. He stampedes through the door mere minutes after Nezumi left and Shion went after him, announcing they were going for a walk, and plants himself in front of the counter, nostrils flaring and lips taut. She wasn't expecting him, but it's Inukashi's usual manner to drop in unplanned.

“So is he going to stay this time?”

Inukashi's manners have never taken her aback, not after Safu's, but this is abruptness beyond what he's used her to.

“I think it's early to worry about that. Would you like some lemon pie?”

She doesn't wait for his answer before slipping Inukashi's favorite onto a plate, and down on the kitchen table. There's no discussion that can't be made more relaxed by adding sweets. Eating will also prevent him from pacing around the store's front room as he's started doing.

“Yeah, thanks,” he says, and slumps down in a grudging heap on one of the kitchen chairs. “I waited until he left,” he says bluntly. “I didn't want him to see me.” Two mouthfuls disappear half the slice. “The cake's great,” he says, the crumbs sticking to the corner of his lips expertly licked away. “How's Shion doing?”

Karan leans against the counter. “He's happy, of course. He's been waiting for a long time.”

The spoon Karan gave Inukashi along with the plate spears down on the pie slice like Inukashi is imagining dismembering an enemy, cutting through the pie and screeching against the plate, making Karan wince. “Don't let him fool you,” Inukashi grits. “He's a no-good conman with a heart of _stone_. Rikiga said, didn't he? He'd said he'd tell you.”

“He did.”

Inukashi stuffs his mouth with the last piece. “Well, you know I think he's full of hot air most of the time, but where that man's concerned he's right on the money. Is he trying to charm you? That's something he'd do.” He considers. “Well, that's something he _could_ do,” he corrects.

Karan replays Nezumi's brusqueness, the spiky distance he arrived with, and snorts. “I think it's safe to say I'm not being courted, if that's what you're afraid of.”

She pretends not to hear his mumbled reply about Rikiga and Nezumi's acting days. For a few minutes she lets Inukashi play with the last crumbs in his plate that he's pushing around with his spoon.

“I think you're misjudging him,” she says, gentle, “based on your previous experiences. He's--” _changed_ is not the word she wants to use, he didn't come back because he'd changed, he came back because he's _dealt_ with changing “--come back. Don't you think he deserves a chance?”

Inukashi's lips curl in a snarl like he's going to argue, then smooth over. “I just—what if he hurts him?”

Her arms have crossed out of her own volition. “Nezumi would never hurt Shion,” she chides.

“Shion's too trusting and _you're_ too trusting,” Inukashi accuses.

Karan raises her eyebrows. Says not a word of Shion's achievements, of a city based on trust.

Inukashi... relents. Takes a breath. 

“So. He's not saying anything stupid about leaving yet?”

She shakes her head.

“Good,” he mumbles again, and starts playing with the crumbs in his plate again. Then he starts talking about the baby, in a tone that shares much of the same derisive, worried quality as his concern over Shion, and takes his leave before the boys come back.

*

When he puts his mind to it, Nezumi can be as discreet as his namesake.

When he's not being quiet, he's being abrasive. Most of it directed toward Shion; with him, Nezumi acts haughty like some beggar prince from the fairy tales of her childhood. Shion doesn't seem to mind – takes the complaints as endearments, tranquil and untroubled – so Karan pictures Nezumi in the style of the golden-etched Art Nouveau posters she saw last week at the museum, or bright and broken like colored glass in a church.

When he's by himself, sometimes he speaks, soft. To the mice, given the names she sometimes overhears. At first she thought he was reciting under his breath – Hamlet is an old, old mouse, but while Nezumi was gone Shion adopted Desdemona and Beatrice, among others whom he didn't name after characters. But amidst his murmurs there was a soft hissing sound that came back often, and that sounded like _cherish_ , and in no play that Karan has heard of is there a character called _Shion_. Nezumi speaks to the mice of her son. 

It'd be more constructive to speak to Shion himself, Karan reflects, communication being supposedly a foundation of good relationships, but her own experience of relationships is limited – she chose when she wanted to be a mother and picked the other half of her baby's genetics on No.6's database. Communication for Nezumi involves quotations from books Shion has read; anything more straightforward is bound to come out peevish and insulting, and in the end more dishonest. 

She takes to leaving Nezumi in charge of the store when she has to be out on architect business – to check on the construction site or to meet with the committee about the project for a park they'd like her to be involved with, and Karan told them it's not her specialty but doesn't have the heart to turn them down, even after how the last city she was involved in designing turned out – and leaving the laundry out to dry and trust him to take it back inside at the first drops. She notices an improvement in her daily takings without being certain of the reason, whether it's simply old customers returning now the store's hours are consistent once again, a general improvement in the standards of living, or Nezumi being easy on the eyes, and treating costumer service as just another chance to perform.

It helps, but Karan is concerned it might take too much of Nezumi's time to let him do what he really likes.

He's got into the habit of butting into every production the university theater puts together. At the moment performances only take place on week-ends, all productions amateur by necessity; the city's reconstruction demands time and help from every pair of hands. Nezumi himself has put in his fair share of hours at the library, though he never misses an opportunity to remind Shion about this cruel and unusual extending of his personal resources. Nezumi just likes complaining to Shion, the more dramatically the better.

For all that Inukashi and Rikiga swore up and down that Nezumi looks out for himself first and foremost, he's never slacked off on giving a hand. He lives here so it's normal he helps out, but she doesn't like the idea that he'd let it take a higher priority over his own interests. She doesn't want her house to be that kind of stifling community.

“Your hours in the bakery, on top of your hours at the library, that's starting to be a lot, isn't it? I don't want it to get in the way of your acting,” she tells him once.

“There's not much of it to be gotten in the way thereof at the moment,” he replies without batting an eye, while Karan mentally pulls the sentence apart and together again into a structure that she can follow.

The neutrality of his tone gives no hint whether she should say she's glad or sorry for it. She watches him, nestled on an armchair with his arm protectively curled around his book and the sweater Shion was looking for before he left around his shoulder and a half-eaten cranberry muffin by his tea mug. Like Shion, Nezumi likes to surround himself with things of the people he cares about, making himself at home wherever he goes. Who took it from the other?

She's gotten used to well-behaved mice in her kitchen. Nezumi's ease with the cutting knife flashes through her mind. He had good reasons for it; No.6 treating people like vermin and punishing them when they resisted. (There's a permanent exposition on the walls of old No.6 buildings about civil protest, and a section of the brand-new History Museum about the Mao.)

But mice aren't men, and what is a city but the people? A city should be human-sized. Forgetting that may be the first thing that the old No.6 got wrong. 

“Well, keep it in mind anyway.”

*

Karan wasn't there when Nezumi went to see the construction site of the theater, only Shion was. 

As usual, she only catches the repercussions, the before and after of the decisions they take, the echoes of the arguments behind the closed door to Shion's room, private storms; she's there in the interstices, Shion's supportive and hopeful mom. 

She doesn't go with them for the long walks they take together through the city, their itinerary traipsing like their conversation, snaking here and there, aimless. When they talk about their stroll, it's only by mentions of the incidents that punctuated it, or the particular aesthetics of a place along the way. 

There's no logic to these excursions, which Shion doesn't bother to hide and that just makes Nezumi shrug, no destination in sight. 

Like their bickering, it draws a circle, outside of which she stands. She can see them in her mind's eye, eyes fixed on each other, circling and circling, not competition but balance. 

The only goal is to maintain the equilibrium as long as possible. The only aim is the company.

Shion's exuberant and Nezumi tight-lipped, neither an ideal guide to detail where they've been on any given day. 

After some time she can piece together parts of their itinerary, when they've filled themselves with the city so that it inhabits them, becoming apparent on their bodies. The crumbled remnants of Moon Dome wrack Nezumi's shoulders; Shion's knuckles and eyes linger like the wall that went endlessly brushing by the city, its embrace indirect. The new library fills Nezumi with contentment, softens his edges, like the edges of the book it put in Shion's hands. Chronos makes them both grin, and elbow one another. 

They're not an open book; they're a city map.

*

Visiting the future theater is a sign of commitment she doubts even Inukashi could deny, and wonders whether she ought to expect Nezumi to be restless after that.

“Maybe I should move out,” Nezumi says the next day, out of the blue. They're downstairs, all three of them. If this was a discussion Nezumi and Shion wanted to have, they could as easily have it in their room. If he chose to throw it out there instead, a conversational gambit ruthlessly exposed to the slaughter, he intends to drag her into it, either as a participant or as a spectator. Karan is certain she hasn't been handed the booklet to this particular performance.

“Hm. We should find a place close to the theater,” Shion says, thoughtfully.

Nezumi explained the basics of improv theater a few days back, the first rule of which being never to negate your partner's offers. Looking back, it sounds like relationship guidelines far more than it did at the time.

“I'm aware of the royal custom to use the first person plural to refer to one's self, Your Majesty, but I hadn't realized you'd also started appropriating my singular.”

“Appropriating your singular sounds nice,” Shion muses.

They've forgotten she is here. 

Karan virtuously pretends that there's a wall between she and them and she has heard nothing. Nezumi throws Shion a look that positively drips acid.

”Mangled grammar rarely does. You're not a poet to pull it off.”

Shion blinks.

“I thought you didn't believe in prescriptivism.”

That's a Nezumi word, Karan is willing to bet. She'd remember if Shion's jargon didn't relate to hard sciences.

“I'll make an exception for you.”

Shion smiles, sunny without a reason. “Hey, Nezumi, read something aloud.”

“What am I, personal entertainment for His Majesty now?” The words hang over them for a moment.

Then Shion leans forward, cocks his head toward Nezumi, keeps the conversation going.

“You wanted to perform at the Rose Festival two weeks from now, right? You can practice on us. Plus, I like listening to you.”

“And your expertise of the theatrical arts is such that your comments will be invaluable to me.”

“I dunno, I think I have a handle on drama.” Shion's voice strikes the mild, amused tone that Nezumi takes as a challenge. 

Smoothly, Nezumi stands, disturbing the visual balance she's grown used to: Shion and Nezumi sitting by side on twin chairs, white and dark hair and communal sweaters. There was some air between them, part of their shared bubble that Nezumi dislodges - like watching a piece of a puzzle breaking away from a whole, Nezumi's angles suddenly showing. He shakes his head as though flipping hair behind his shoulder, casts a look at Shion. His wrists are upturned in a declamation stance that makes Shion grin; Nezumi's eyes narrow.

“A little Madness in the Spring  
Is wholesome even for the King,  
But God be with the Clown –  
Who ponders this tremendous scene –  
This whole Experiment of Green –  
As if it were his own! ”

Nezumi's a professional. He's glaring at Shion, but his voice shows nothing of it, rising and lulling like a song without music.

After the last of the echo has died, Nezumi holds Shion's stunned gaze for a minute, then looks away.

“What was that?” Shion asks, sounding out of breath.

“Emily Dickinson. Read some _poetry_ for a change,” Nezumi drops before leaving the room, the sentence like a judgment. His steps echo up the stairs a moment later, hurried.

Daydreams keep Shion pinned to his seat, chin propped up on his hands, his eyes lost in the vagueness. 

Dinnertime is taken up by a sniping semi-argument about whether poetry has its place at a theater festival – Shion claiming it does because both are meant to be spoken and Nezumi retorting that anyone who wishes to engage Nezumi in a discussion over dramatic theory ought to watch more than half-a-dozen half-cocked performances – and also that if Shion wants people to treat performing arts with respect, he needs to take people coming to watch arts being performed with respect, and that includes not insulting Nezumi by insisting poetry recitation is the same as acting out a part, _Shion_.

No more is uttered about the possibility of Nezumi going away, Shion's manoeuvre a success.

Nezumi only let himself be distracted because he wanted to be distracted, of course. Karan responds by offering a strawberry shortcake for dessert she's noticed Nezumi always takes a third slice of after the customary second. She's no scientist, but even she knows good behaviour should be rewarded.

*

It's a bad dream that wakes her up; one of those where a fire starts in the oven of her bakery, and spreads to the rest of the house, and eats the whole city, and by the time she thinks of looking into her kitchen No.6 is an inferno that she didn't think to watch over. In her dream, she knows people are dead, but she just shrugs and prepares to bake another cake by the heat of the flames. She calls Shion when the cake is done, calls and calls, but he never comes, and the only reply she gets is the fire crackling, burning. 

The comforting darkness of her room soothes away the glare behind her eyes some, and she blinks away the water coating her cornea, trying to clear her eyes, her thoughts. Blood pounds in her ears. Her mouth is too dry – tongue thick with blood – to let her swallow. Under the thick blanket, she feels like she's boiling. The heat must have prompted the nightmare – that and a few leftover symbols from the Mao exhibition, at the end of which a short text reminding the reader of how many forest acres and human lives had been lost to the flames of No.6. She hadn't been that familiar with that particular image of Hell before.

That and guilt.

She sits in her bed for a few moments, forcing calming breaths down her throat, massaging her temples.

Closing her eyelids, she fancies she can still feel the burst of heat from the flickering flames against her face.

She's going to take a glass of milk downstairs. Finish her novel, and after that – she glances at her clock – 3:00 – after that it's going to be the time where she starts on the morning's bread anyway. More or less. She'll just have a bit of an early morning, that's all.

Wrapping herself in her dressing gown, she leaves her room, her feet light on the old wooden floor. Her fingers hesitate on the switch, heat headache roiling behind her eyeballs, aching with remembered blare. No. No light. She'll take an aspirin downstairs. Keeping a hand on the wall, it's easy enough to walk down stairs she's climbed up and down several times a day over eight years without tripping, and there's a light downstairs. She must have forgotten to turn the light off in the kitchen; no wonder her subconscious ran with it...

“--an imbecile,” Nezumi's far-away voice echoes.

Not forgetfulness, then; just the boys.

Shion's reply, if any, is muffled by the distance. He doesn't know the trick for casting his voice the way Nezumi does.

“No.4 has a perfectly serviceable police force, and I cannot _believe_ I am defending this opinion.” 

The exchange is becoming clearer as Karan comes closer, light pouring out of the bakery's main room, attacking sensitive eyes. She pauses in the dark, eyelids crinkled.

“There are no police because we thought it's be more trouble than was it worth, y'know, what with the last police force No.6 had...”

“And how is _that_ working out for you?”

A drawer is slammed. This is far too much aggression for the hour. There was a performance at the university theater yesterday. It's not outside the realm of possibility that they chose to take the scenic route home, and Nezumi's words ring an alarm bell through the fog of Karan’s sleepiness.

Karan's breath catches, running the words through her mind again. Her weight rests more heavily on her hand.

“Well, after the wall, no-one exactly wanted a police force. There's no people disappearing mysteriously this time. And everyone's working together about the kind of thing that the police are supposed to handle.”

He sounds alright. Candid. Slight, familiar noise in the background - metal, scraping, sliding rythmically.

“And what about the guy who would have kicked your ass if not for my timely intervention? Don't turn your head.”

“I guess the ex-police sometime wish we'd kept a police force,” Shion says ruefully.

The metal stops. Scissors. Shion's words have annoyed Nezumi enough that he stopped cutting – whatever it was. Karan can't help her lips curling up; it's sweet.

When Nezumi speaks again, his tone is clipped.

“Not everyone who deserved to die in the swarm did.”

“Nezumi...”

“I'm not going to be sorry.”

This is the Nezumi Inukashi and Rikiga warned her about, the survivor who's torn a place for himself out of the streets of West Block, the one he's let her know exist in flashes of light on a knife blade. This is the Nezumi that saved her son's life.

Karan presses her back against the wall, lets the house take her weight, taking support in the foundations of the house. No.6 and the Forest did burn, but this, this new thing, it's safe.

“Don't you think maybe they lived for a reason? I thought we'd agreed it was an act of god or something.”

“A Deus ex Machina. And we're both agnostic. Unless you're telling me you think it's proof enough that a god exists if this man was allowed to survive so he could accomplish his grand destiny and punch you in the face.” A pause. “Not that I can't understand the appeal.” Another pause. “Get your hair out of your face when I'm sticking a plaster on it.” 

The impatience in his tone make Karan smile.

“This feels nostalgic,” Shion mutters.

“...why am I not surprised you'd find the days of misery, danger, and irregular meals something to be sentimental about.” His words say he should close himself off, but his voice is rough, chopped. “You take terrible care of yourself. It's a wonder you survived at all until I came back. I'll have to thank your mother.”

“West Block wasn't that bad.” Soft, like a caress to an animal both wild and wounded.

“Were you using up your vacation time in West Block? If so, I'd have one thing or two to say about that slumming habit of yours, Your Majesty. Danger, misery, etc.”

“I meant the company.”

“...You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.” From Nezumi's tone, it's a quote.

“Are you talking about yourself, Nezumi?”

She can imagine the shrug, the studied construction of uncaring working Nezumi's shoulders.

“Maybe I'm talking about No.6.”

Shion laughs. “I hope that doesn't make you the rose.” A shared reference. It happens, sometimes. It means Nezumi doesn't need to use his own words. His meanings coil between printed lines, that Shion follows on Nezumi's lips.

“Are you calling me high maintenance?”

“No. Just that I'm not planning to leave you anytime soon. Or No.6,” he adds.

Karan lets her eyes fall closed, lets Shion and Nezumi's voices wash over her, bathing her in relief. Their mixing voices sound like a promise for the future.

“Shion, you--” there's a silence, and then Nezumi saying, “oh, are we resorting to interrupting others when they say something you don't like, then? How perfectly civilized of you.”

“No, no, I want to hear you speak forever.” Shion's voice drops to a murmur. “But I'm not very good with speaking, so I'm depending on another language to get through to you.”

“I suppose allowances should be made. You're at least employing a common language.”

A breathless, strikingly happy laugh in Shion's voice.

“Though your lack of fluency causes me physical discomfort. C’m’ere.” 

Then there's only silence, and rustling. When Karan risks a glance, their hands are bent together, like they were earlier, Nezumi's hands in Shion's hair. Shion has an arm wrapped around Nezumi's neck.

She slips away without a sound. Tonight, nightmares of a city burning down will be held at bay, by whispers in her kitchen.

*

When storm season rolls back, the familiar gleam enters Shion's eyes again. Whipping rain beats drumlike on the shop windows; in-between the squalls Karan can make out thumping down the stairs.

“I'm going out, Mom!” he calls, the door already open, wind tearing at his words, and then he's out. Late summer storms that turn mid-afternoon dark, gusts that rip fences and young trees. He turns, asks over his shoulder, “are you coming, Nezumi?”

**Author's Note:**

> "A little Madness in the Spring" is acknowledged as Emily Dickinson, but there are other quotes (or almost quotes) that are left unattributed in the text:
> 
> "What is the city but the people?” - William Shakespeare, _Coriolanus_ , that Karan unknowingly paraphrases.
> 
> "You are responsible forever for what you have tamed." - Antoine de St Exupéry, _The Little Prince_.


End file.
